We didn’t have the resources to provide a high quality private education, so we uprooted, sold our stuff, packed up a cargo trailer and a van, and spent a decade getting by on a shoestring while doing the most interesting and challenging things we imagined we might achieve as a family.

From an early age, aside from their siblings, they interacted primarily with adults in their world, often from different cultures and speaking different languages, and often in situations where the stakes were high (intrinsic danger imposed by the natural environment and classical physics) .

They learned to be a cohesive team, to handle responsibility within the range of their understanding, to seek and accept council, and to ignore immature behavior when it pops up in inappropriate times.

This sometimes rugged beginning has served them quite well in their lives.

After traveling from Alaska to Oregon , we traded in the cargo trailer for a camper trailer because camping was a pain in the “@&. We shipped our tools and supplies from the cargo trailer to a boatyard in Florida.

When we got to the boatyard, we spent the next two years living in our camper as we rebuilt a 50foot steel schooner.

We didn’t have much cash, so we did all of the work ourselves and salvaged steel from where we could find it.

We became great customers of the metal recyclers in the area lol.

The most expensive thing was buying the epoxy based paint and the bottom paint, which cost almost as much as we paid for the boat. (And the 500 dollars a month for the boatyard)

Other than that , thousands of grinding disks and maybe 20 harbor freight grinders lol.we found they would last through 4 or 5 brush replacements if you didn’t burn up the armatures by using brushes to the point of failure.

We spent the next few years sailing the east coast and the Caribbean, central and northern South America. We would salvage contaminated fuel and filter it and treat itfor our auxiliary engine and generator, getting paid for removing the expired diesel, and I did engine and electrical repair on other boats.

It wasn’t a comfortable life, but it was full of opportunities to teach things about life, lots of skills, and independent thinking and action. Probably the most important lessons were in risk tolerance and risk management. It’s easy to be overly risk averse in the modern world, or to limit your risk taking to avocational pursuits.

I was happy to swallow the anchor when it was time for the kids to start building their social structures and to get started in more advanced levels of education.

It was hard, and an enormous sacrifice for more than a decade, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for my kids for anything else that we could have realistically managed.

The kids grew up in an adult world, but there were lots of other boat kids, and we often stopped for months at a time. When we would be in a place for more than a month or two, the kids would enroll in local schools, which we treated like social studies/ language class, managing primary curriculum on the boat.

Anyway, I’m really happy with the results. They’re all grown and starting families of their own now, and it’s been obvious that their upbringing was key in their many successes.

They refer to it as their “cheat code” because they basically aren’t deterred by anything that they have to learn or become proficient in, and they know from experience that they can do anything they reasonably decide to do.

They have all built houses (as in personally built them) and have are finding their way in software, finance, politics, farming, robotics, and whatever else is interesting to them… basically living what most would describe as a privileged life despite having come from very modest means.